


Research Methods, or, How I Wound Up With a Zeiss Projector Under My Desk

by Framlingem



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-07
Updated: 2010-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Framlingem/pseuds/Framlingem
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jim Kirk spent more time in the academy library than most first-year cadets.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Research Methods, or, How I Wound Up With a Zeiss Projector Under My Desk

The library has always been my favourite part of the Academy. When I was a student, I'd spend all night here. There wasn't really much point – it's not like the articles and documents available to students can't all be accessed from the dormitory terminals and student PADDs anyway – but there was something special about sitting in the Khatami Memorial Library at night, with actual hardcopies sitting on shelves. It was like all the people who wrote them were there telling their stories, memories in the roughness of the paper covers.

Yeah, I know. Pretty flighty stuff. I've always been like that, though. When I was commissioned as an Information Officer, Ma turned to Uncle Pete and told him "Pay up, she's a librarian."

We're open twenty-four hours now, because I pointed out that some students' brains work more efficiently in the night hours and that we provide a quiet study location where the residences might not. I had studies to back me up. I guess volunteering to work the night shift might have had something to do with it, too – it's not as though anyone else wanted it.

Most nights it's pretty quiet. We keep the lights dimmed in areas of the library that nobody's using and it's usually a lot like the sky: a book-filled darkness lit by the odd star of a student's workdesk. They tend to stay put once they've settled in with whatever they're doing by the wee hours of the morning. Tonight, though, there's one moving, and after the eighth muffled curse and third book thudding back onto the shelf a little harder than is strictly necessary, I stop waiting for whoever it is to come and ask for help – or, god forbid, figure out the Dewey Decimal System or our user-friendly PADD catalogue – and wander over to join him.

"Looking for anything in particular?"  
"GAH!" He jumps back and drops the book he'd been leafing through. I catch it before it hits the ground – librarians have excellent reflexes, and Starfleet Information Officers are combat-trained to boot. He has the grace to look impressed, and then the temerity to _lean_ on the shelf and grin at me. "Hey! Great hair. I thought librarians had to wear it in buns."  
"I'd remind you I'm a superior officer, cadet. What were you looking for?"

He scratches the back of his head and looks sheepish. "Um. I was wondering if you had anything available about the _Kelvin_. I've found a few things, but they're mostly newspaper articles. I was hoping for details."  
"We're the Starfleet library, cadet," I say drily. "It's amazing how much information we have on Starfleet missions. Come on, I'll show you how the cataloguing system works."

The first night, I set him up with a book on the astrophysics that included the data the _Kelvin_ survivors managed to rescue, and returned to my desk where I'm midway through recataloguing articles which are no longer accurate but still historically interesting. There are a lot of them.

Six nights later, he comes up to the desk and asks if the library has any equipment he could use to model particular areas of space. We don't, but I give him the name of a cartography professor who might be able to help him out. The next day, he's back lugging something roughly the size of a suitcase, and asks if there was anywhere he could leave it during the day. So - Zeiss projector. Under my desk. Lack of leg room, ahoy!

He's here a lot, even by my standards. He somehow finds out what my beverage of choice is and one day when I come in there's a mint-hot-chocolate sitting by my nameplate in a library-approved-spillproof-insulated-mug, with a slogan on it that says "Librarians do it quietly - but they know where to find everything", and a picture of a lady holding a book and looking...rumpled. Every few nights, there's another book, another journal article, and another hot drink, and after six months I'm scouring the archives for him to find anything even tangentially-related. I'm curious enough now to want to look him up in the system, but I don't know his name, and it's past the point where it would be awkward to ask, so I don't.

Every so often there's an older guy with Medical insignia on who comes in and gesticulates madly at him. Older Guy yelled the first night, but my glare shut him up. It might also have been the whisper I thought I heard: "Bones, she's the librarian. I wouldn't have found half of this without her. Knowledge is power, she controls knowledge, don't make me spell it out for you, man."

Gestures are fine. Just don't knock anything. I like Older Guy - I don't think the kid is getting enough sleep, really, and Older Guy seems to agree with me on that.

Eight months in, I drop a chip on the kid's desk. He picks it up, reads the label, and his face goes poker-blank. "Yeah," he says softly. "I figured I'd be reading Captain Pike's dissertation eventually. You read this?" I tell him that no, I haven't read it, but the truth is that I have and I didn't give it to him before because it alone has the audio files. Whatever answer he's looking for, I wanted to spare him that. It's an analysis of the information contained elsewhere, but unlike the starcharts and the equations and the cold recitation of the order of events, this dissertation is coloured with grief, and it's the hardest thing I've ever read.

I leave him to it. Leave him alone in a cubicle-shaped puddle of light in the darkness, even when he drops his PADD onto the table, drops his chin into his hands, and sits like that for a hundred and three minutes, until Older Guy comes in looking for him, posture and facial tension doing a marvellous job of explaining without a sound just how late the hour is, and just how tiny the kid's brain has to be to not realise it - until he spots the kid and is stopped in his tracks by the sight. "Jim," he says, and for the first time I know the kid's name, "Jim. What?"

The kid - _Jim_ \- looks up at him and I hope I never see that expression on anyone's face again. When he speaks, his voice is quiet, controlled. "There's nothing here, Bones. Nothing. This -" he brandishes the chip with Pike's dissertation on it "- this is the last piece. I have been through everything, top to bottom, I have run simulations, I have done the math backwards and forwards and inverted once for kicks and I have found nothing. There was _nothing_ to do. Nothing!"

Older Guy sits down next to him, and they stay that way for a while. I finish up some filing.

The kid starts using the library during the day, and I don't see him again.

_"Based on what facts?"  
"That same anomaly, a lightning storm in space, that we saw today, also occured on the day of my birth, before a Romulan ship attacked the _USS Kelvin_. You know that, sir, I read your dissertation." _


End file.
